Reflection/Amplification Attacks

In a reflection attack, the attacker sends traffic to a reflector, and spoofs the source address of its packets using the target's IP address.

The reflector (ie. a DNS server) sends the reply to the target's IP address.

If the amount of traffic sent to the target is large enough, this can result in a denial-of-service.

A reflection attack becomes an amplification attack when the amount of traffic sent by the attacker is small, but it triggers a large amount of traffic from the reflector to the target.